The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900

A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Fifty miles of low-lying sand – Galveston Island to the southwest and the Bolivar Peninsula to the northeast – separate Galveston Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The city of Galveston itself lies on the eastern tip of the island, overlooking the channel that leads to the bay’s sheltered waters. It was a cotton port second only to New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century. Eighty-six million dollars in foreign exports alone passed over its wharfs from 1899-1900. The ocean had made Galveston. Tourists, as well as traders, flocked to the city taking in the broad beach and sweeping water views, enjoying the opera house and opulent hotels that cotton money had built. On the night of September 8, 1900, the ocean destroyed it. The storm came, as most did in 1900, without warning. Forecasters from the United States Weather Bureau forecasters noted a “storm of moderate intensity” striking Cuba on September 1, unleashing heavy rains before reaching the open water of the Gulf on September 5. They assumed that it would curve northeast, across Florida and into the Atlantic, but their colleagues in Cuba insisted that it would continue to the west, striking Texas. By the morning of September 7, accumulating evidence suggested that the Cubans had been right. Observers on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts reported storm damage overnight, a ship leaving New Orleans reported hurricane-force winds in the Gulf, and Isaac Cline, head of the Weather Bureau’s office in Galveston, watched large swells rolling in from the east. Cline had previously written, in a July 1891 newspaper article for the Galveston News, that there was little chance of a severe hurricane striking Galveston, but now he reversed himself. On the afternoon of September 7 twin flags – black squares on red – rose above the Weather Bureau office, signaling a hurricane warning. Few heeded it.

Ruins on St. Lucas Terrace, Library of Congress.

September 8, a Saturday, brought stronger winds, bigger waves, and rain. The anemometer at Cline’s office registered sustained winds of 80 mph by late afternoon. Within an hour, the wind speed was 100 mph and climbing. Just after 8 PM, the anemometer was carried away by winds estimated at 120 mph. Bad as the winds were, however, the water was worse. The leading edge of a hurricane drives a dome of water, raised by high winds and low atmospheric pressure, before it. When a hurricane makes landfall, the dome becomes a storm surge: a sudden, temporary, localized rise in sea level that can drown coastal cities and overwhelm low-lying islands. The Galveston hurricane’s storm surge raised sea level by as much as 15 feet. The highest points in Galveston were less than nine feet above the water, and most were several feet lower. Years of shaving off the tops of sand hills and dune to fill low spots for building and expand beaches had flattened the island’s profile, and by mid-afternoon on the 8th, Galveston was rapidly disappearing under water. Watching the sea creep inexorably inward from the beach, flooding block after block, Isaac Cline recognized the disaster that was about to befall the city. At 2:30 PM he dispatched his brother Joseph, who was also his assistant, with a message for Weather Bureau headquarters in Washington. It reported that half the city was underwater, and Joseph remarked later that, had he realized the full extent of the situation at the time he sent it, he could have amended it to: “Entire city now under water.” Joseph waded through waist-deep water and floating debris to the telegraph office, only to be told that the lines had been dead for hours. One phone line to the mainland still functioned, however, and the intervention of a friend who worked at the local telephone company moved Joseph’s call ahead of 4,000 others waiting to be connected by the Galveston operator. His enciphered message to Washington reached the Western Union telegraph office in Houston just before the telephone line, too, went dead. It read, in part: “A great calamity is upon us.”

A “dead gang” gathers bodies for burning, Library of Congress.

Just how great a calamity was becoming all too apparent by the time Isaac – wading, more than walking – made his way to his home. Water in the streets was waist-deep and rising steadily. The timbers that had formed the city’s wooden sidewalks floated atop the water like a crust, and winds in excess of 80 miles per hour hurled timbers through the air. When Isaac reached home, he found nearly 50 people, in addition to his wife Cora and his three daughters, already sheltering there: neighbors and strangers who, like the Clines, saw it as a place of safety. The water was soon nine feet deep, engulfing the first floor, and the group abandoned it for the second, but the house remained secure against the storm. Joseph arrived, and argued that they should flee to higher ground, but Isaac declared the safety of the house preferable to the rising waters and flying debris outside. At the height of the storm, however, a multi-ton section of a demolished bridge slammed into the house, shattering it and throwing everyone inside into the sea. Isaac and Joseph spent the night clinging to floating debris, holding tightly to Isaac’s three daughters and a mother and child they had pulled from the sea. Cora Cline drowned, trapped in the wreckage that had, moments earlier, been her home. Sunday, September 9, dawned bright and clear, revealing the extent of the devastation. Hundreds of businesses, churches, and public buildings had been destroyed, along with 3,400 homes. Many of those still standing had suffered severe structural damage: walls holed, roofs torn away, or frames twisted by the force of the water. Every bridge to the mainland was down, and nearly every ship at the wharf sunk or beached. A delegation dispatched by the mayor left for Texas City on one of the few surviving ships, and late on Sunday night one of its members reached the telegraph office in Houston. The elaborate formality of the message he dispatched to Governor Joseph Sayers and President William McKinley underscored the devastating simplicity of its conclusion: “I have been deputized by the mayor and Citizen's Committee of Galveston to inform you that the city of Galveston is in ruins."

House on stilts, waiting for a new foundation, 1901, Galveston and Texas History Center, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, TX

The dead lay everywhere, so numerous that they quickly overwhelmed the local mortuaries and were already beginning to decompose in the warm, humid air. Hastily organized crews of workers, dubbed “dead gangs,” stacked the corpses on pushcarts and wheeled them through the streets to the waterfront, where fifty African-American laborers “recruited” at gunpoint transferred them to a barge and prepared them for burial at sea. The workers were fortified with free whiskey as an inducement to keep working and a buffer against the psychological toll the work exacted. When burial at sea proved a grotesque failure – 700 bodies committed to the Gulf on Monday afternoon began washing up on Galveston beaches by nightfall – the leaders of the dead gangs were ordered to collect and burn the bodies where they lay. Pyres made of scrap lumber and stacked corpses blazed day and night, and smoke from them stained the skies for weeks after the storm. Individual, ritualized cremation was still new to Americans in 1900, and mass burnings of the dead were as disturbing, in their own way, as the sight of unburied corpses in the streets. The survivors rebuilt their city, fully aware now of how precarious its position was. A board of engineers, formed to work out the specifics of protecting Galveston from the sea, issued its recommendations in January 1902 to build a seawall to deflect incoming waves, and raise the city as much as 17 feet to protect it from future storm surges. The seawall alone cost over 1 million dollars, and much of the city’s tax base still lay in ruins, but a bond referendum to fund the wall passed, in November 1902, by a landslide. There were 3,085 votes in favor, and only 21 opposed. Construction began almost immediately, and by the summer of 1904 a 3.3-mile concrete barrier divided the heart of the city from the sea. Behind the wall, the city itself rose. Street by street, engineers marked the new ground level with stripes painted on telephone poles. Property owners raised their buildings to match and built new foundations beneath them, or resigned themselves to having their first-floor rooms turned into a basement. Two million dollars, 15 million cubic yards of sand, and 2,100 raised buildings later, the ground beneath Galveston sloped from eight feet above sea level just behind the wall to twenty-two feet along the island’s new crest. The time, treasure, and trouble involved in rebuilding the city soon paid off, however. When yet another hurricane hit Galveston head-on in August 1915, it caused only minor flooding, and killed only a handful. No one knows, or ever will know, the precise death toll from the hurricane of 1900. The storm, and its aftermath, was too chaotic for precise records. The official figure of 6,000 dead is likely too low. The “1900 Storm,” as it is still known in south Texas, remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history. More than 300 cyclonic storms have made landfall in the United States since 1900, and all of them together claimed fewer lives than the Galveston hurricane did in one terrible night.